Studied LiFi networks. There's nothing that would prevent it being used from today on. It's just all about maturing of markets. Basically all core of the core Internet already runs on light technology, it's not just used for the last hop. This also nicely reminds me from IRDA.

Wondered again how slow some USB sticks can be. It's clear that mounting, file handling and unmounting is much faster when using exfat with those. But for extended disk operations ntfs seems to be faster, but I guess that's only due to some kind of write caching. So if you dismount the drive often, it's not faster, then it's slower.

UTF8, Unicode. I was kind of hoping that we could get rid of character set issues for ever when Unicode was introduced, but it seems that hope was completely vain. I'm encountering character set issues weekly, even if UTF-8 is being used. Here's example about the issues with MySQL.

Quite nice post, why Python runs so slow. I think this is very informative for the n00bs I've been writing often about. The guys, who are programmers, but don't know anything about computers or software.(lol) Well, there's positive and negative things on everything. I've been very happy with Python so far. I'm very aware about the overhead and I know how to deal with if and when required. So far, I haven't had any problems. When I design programs, I acknowledge overhead of certain data structures and avoid those if I think it would be a problem. Gladly servers got usually plenty of excess resources, so 'wasting' some of it for faster and more reliable development isn't a problem. I've also run into traps at times, when trying to optimize something, making it really complex mess to understand and maintain. It's faster, but it's very hard to grasp how it works. That's usually bad optimization choice.

Forrester lists APIs and integration as one of the Top Technology Trends for 2014. I've been doing system integration for over 15 years and I haven't been ever busier. A lot of real time integrations are made all the time with BI, CRM, ERP, Invoicing, bookkeeing, accounting, etc. systems. I'm currently working on several projects in parallel. They also listed cloud and mobile technology, trust and identity management rethinking, software defined networks (SDN) and software defined data center (SDDC) which isn't any kind of surprise for sure.

I'm not going to mention any details, but let's just say that this made me smile: "Many firms have cloud strategies and mobile strategies, but the report makes the point that the benefits of the cloud will be limited by the speed with which traditional applications are re-written to take advantage of cloud. Without this redesign, benefits will be limited."

Some things should be simple, but aren't. This is excellent question, if xml tags should be closed or not in HTML. Well, of course... Or maybe not. Find it out, and read the article: To close, or not to close.